Adyashanti

Awakening to the truth is a deep realization of what you are as an experience. What is it that is listening? What is it that is feeling? Feel it. Sense it. Welcome it.

All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. When you start to see the light that you really are, the light waking up in you, the radiance, you realize it has no intention to change you. It has no intention to harmonize. It has no agenda. It just happens. The Truth is the only thing you’ll ever run into that has no agenda. Everything else will have an agenda.

Life

Birth: Adyashanti was born as Steven Gray

Realization: Adyashanti studied Zen for 14 years under the guidance of his Zen teacher Arvis Joen Justi. He was regularly sent by Arvis to Zen sesshins, where he also studied under Jakusho Kwong Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center. At age 25 he began experiencing a series of transformative spiritual awakenings.

Death: Alive

Teaching Style: Adyashanti’s basic teaching methods are his public interactions at Satsangs, and what he calls True Meditation. True Meditation is the form of meditation that he suggests his students practice while on his retreats. It has two components, silent sitting and meditative Self-Inquiry. In his public events known as Satsangs he gives a Dharma talk and then engages the audience with Questions and Answers. Sometimes these Satsangs are given in an all day, or weekend long, format and are simply called Intensives. He also offers silent retreats several times a year.

Fame: Adyashanti (Sanskrit word meaning, “primordial peace”), is a spiritual teacher from the Bay Area who gives regular Satsangs in the United States and also teaches abroad. He is the author of several books. He is the founder of Open Gate Sangha, Inc. a nonprofit organization that supports, and makes available, his teachings.

Legacy:Though heavily influenced by his Zen background, Adyashanti is not an official Dharma heir of any particular Zen tradition. Rather he is Arvis Justi’s successor in a lay Lineage originally authorized by Taizan Maezumi.His teachings have been compared to those of the early chan masters of China as well as to teachers of Advaita Vedanta in India. Many spiritual seekers have been awakened to their true nature while spending time with Adyashanti.

Teachings

The basic concept of his ideology is that humans tend to identify with a sense of self that is essentially not real, or sometimes called empty.Suffering is thus said to be caused by the belief in a separate self that seems to be divided from the world. If someone was to realize that they, as an individually isolated self, was not real, but that there is only one being .

He says, There is only life living itself, life seeing itself, life hearing itself, life meeting itself as each moment.

He states, When you cease trying to control and manipulate your experience, meditation spontaneously happens . Then, with meditative Self-Inquiry, the one can ask what are considered to be spiritually significant questions. These questions are meant to expose illusionary thoughts and give rise to insight. An example of such a question is the “who am I?”

My Secret is Silence Adyashanti explains, “A spiritual question is like an alarm clock thrown into the dream. “Who am I?” calls into question everything the dreamer believes in, namely him or herself. It disrupts the dream. That’s its purpose.”

According to him the process of inviting others to teach the Dharma is called, transmission of the flame.

Spirituality is essentially about awakening as the intuitive awareness of unity and dissolving our attachment to egoic consciousness.

Spiritual awakening is realizing what occupies the space called “me.” When you listen innocently, you’ll see that there really is something more here than a me.

The enlightenment I speak of is not simply a realization, not simply the discovery of one’s true nature. This is just the beginning—the point of entry into an inner revolution. Realization does not guarantee this revolution, it simply makes it possible.

He told that the end spirituality is not about watching the breath. It’s about waking up from the dream of separateness to the truth of unity.

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